Pre/Pros Vs. Receivers (1 Viewer)

[Bob_M]

Hi All,

I find this puzzling, I was looking over the lab results of the high end Pre/Pros that S&V did a few months back. I was basically looking at the noise results. It's curious that these numbers, although great, have been equaled and surpassed by all in one receivers. So how to pre/pros gives us better "sound quality"? Is it something we can't measure or is the high price mostly for the features rather than an improvement in sound quality?

Thanks for the input.

Bob

 

[Jay Mitchosky]

This thread will stir up a long-standing debate. There is the camp who believes if you can't measure it there's no difference. And there are those who believe hearing is believing. From my perspective it's not all about the numbers, it's the sound. If it sounds better, it is better. And with that in mind you will find the majority of listeners will agree that, all else being equal, separates still have the sonic advantage. So far as features are concerned many times you will find receivers have more bells and whistles than pre/pros.

 

[Kelly Scott Rickards]

Can you say "placebo effect"

 

[Jagan Seshadri]

I have always used receivers BUT I am willing to go with a pre/pro + amplifier setup in the future for the simple reason that I do not want to pay for the amplifier part every time I want to upgrade. Amplifiers last a relatively long time, but "features" are always changing in the preamplifier section. So, upgrade the pre/pro and keep the amp section the same!

Is that a reasonable argument to make, or am I on glue?

-JNS

 

[Christian Speights]

"Puhcleeboh defect."
Damn.

 

[Bob_M]

>So far as features are concerned many times you will find receivers have more bells and whistles than pre/pros. <

So true, something about the Ref30 not having any DSP's is appealing to me.

>So, upgrade the pre/pro and keep the amp section the same!<

I can see your point but at $2500 for a ref 30 I don't see much savings. You can buy top end recievers for that price.

The amplifier section in recievers seems to be taking the hit in late models. So I could see an argument that if you want power separates are the way to go now.

Bob

 

[Ryan Peddle]

The way I have started to look at it(as I am currently looking at moving to seps) is that if your receiver has preouts then upgrade the amp sections. Be it upgrading in stages or one big amp. After that you have all the choices in the world because you now have you power taken care of.

BTW, what prepro was being measured?

 

[Bob_M]

what prepro was being measured?

They had a Lex, ref30 and I can't remember the other one.

 

[Selden Ball]

Bob,

I think there are several factors which cause newer receivers to have better specs on paper than older pre/pros. Mostly, though, I think it's a "leap frog" effect. High end pre/pros simply take longer to design than entry-level systems.

Many of the semiconductor companies (Motorola, for example) provide DSP chips preprogrammed with the latest DD, DTS, and bass management to their customers. As a result, very little design time is needed to hook them up to ADCs and DACs, add another IC to drive the speakers, and put them into a box. Viola: a cheap HT receiver with all the latest bells and whistles.

Another factor is that as the semiconductor companies have larger production runs, it's becoming easier (cheaper) to automatically select out the components with better specs. This includes 24bit ADCs and DACs, which are becoming quite common. In principle, they have better noise and linearity than the 20bit versions used by older pre/pros. On paper, those measly 4 bits automatically yeild a factor of 16 in noise improvement. This isn't necessarily the case on the test bench, of course. Linearity at the 24th bit is quite expensive to achieve, and the output chips will add noise, too.